Closer to home, Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester recently traveled to central Massachusetts to meet with members of the Tantasqua Regional School Committee. The committee has been skeptical of the quality of the new national standards, which the commissioner and the board of education adopted in late July 2010.

The state’s academic standards were considered among the best – if not the absolute best — in the country. In a way the standards were the lifeblood flowing through the entire corpus of the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 because they set academic expectations for all involved. To district leaders and teachers, they gave clear guidance on the high academic bar the state was setting; to teachers they defined the emphases on the teacher licensure tests; and to students, parents, teachers and district leaders they defined the content of a key accountability, the MCAS.

The fact is that while the Commissioner suggests that the two sets of standards are equivalent, the now-defunct state standards and the new national standards are distinguished largely by different philosophies about what the purpose of education is: the state standards embodied the view that all kids must have access to a rich liberal arts curriculum for the twin purposes of good citizenship and readiness for the workplace.

That centuries-long emphasis, from John Adams and the Massachusetts Constitution to Horace Mann and his Common Schools to Tom Birmingham and the landmark 1993 reform legislation, set the function of public education in our Commonwealth and democracy as using the liberal arts as the tool to educate schoolchildren for citizenship and a successful life.

Adoption of the new national standards undermines that historic character of the Massachusetts educational system—and importantly the spirit of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act. The Patrick Administration’s move away from an academic focus toward new national standards that are heavily weighted toward workforce development is a sign of, guess what, a policy view that is based on a narrower workforce development focus.

On April 26th, the Rennie Center will present a forum on the recently released Harvard Graduate School of Education report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. The report argues that our national strategy for education and youth development has been too narrowly focused on an academic, classroom-based approach…

As noted in several recent posts, the narrow focus on workforce development is nothing new to the number of DC players who have been pushing this agenda for decades. For Massachusetts citizens, however, it is very important to distinguish between the path that Massachusetts took, which was largely focused on academics, and the DC/national standards focus on workforce development.

In developing the national standards, DC-based trade organizations like the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve and Fordham, reflected efforts of the early 1990s, which theorized that the United States should be more like Germany and other countries that seek to use their educational systems primarily as ways to shape the workforce. They also reflected the Gates Foundation’s view that workforce development is the critical concern.

Now, I like the free markets as much as anyone, and probably more than most. But the fact is that historically, this country, and especially our state, has aimed for more. Teaching responsibility and the respect for private property was part of Horace Mann’s vision, but so was preparation to be an engaged citizen and knowing your history. As I noted recently, Bill Gates’ publicly stated view is that he is not a great fan of the approach of providing access to rich liberal arts content, and actually advocated cutting the liberal arts in institutions of higher learning.

I find that vision of education restrictive, but far more importantly, the new DC vision for education reform has no track record of success. Massachusetts’ track record from 1993 to 2009 was without peer.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse.

Rob

Jim…you need to be more specific about the standards being changed. Which ones worry you?

http://www.pioneerinstitute.org Jim Stergios

Rob: Sorry for the shorthand, but this is a longstanding argument, and we’ve laid out the nat’l standards’ shortcomings many times. The briefest flavor would be at least to cite these issues:
– Lack of coherent grade-by-grade progressions through high school in both mathematics and English
– Expectations embodied in the content of Common Core’s standards for Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II that are less demanding than the standards in California and Massachusetts and reflect a less rigorous definition of “college readiness”
– Common Core’s replacement of the traditional Euclidean foundations of geometry with an experimental approach to the study of middle and high school geometry that has neither been widely used elsewhere in the world nor considered effective where it has been tried
– Common Core’s aim to teach Algebra I only in high school, at least one year behind the recommendation of the National Mathematics Panel and current practice in both California and our nation’s major international competitors
– The lack of specificity of literary cultural content in high school English
There is more, but that gives you some specifics to start.